http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0517/How-physicists-programmed-AI-to-do-their-job-by-accident
Categories
Particles and Pixels
I can’t find the article now but it suggested to me that perhaps the best way of explaining the Universe was by thinking of particles less as very small specks of stuff.. but more like pixels. I think it was in reference to the idea that our Universe is possibly just a projection from a 2D “hologram” of all the information on the event horizon of a blackhole. Yeah, once you start looking into what the physicists are saying it starts getting a little crazy. But, think of it this way: If you are in a virtual world.. and you are interacting with AI characters.. what’s in their mind? If you look past their pixelly eyeballs and into their “Brains” what would you find? Nothing. Well, nothing unless the programmer decided to waste memory and storage by programming in brains or circuits or something. Why would they bother? So, how exactly is this “person” thinking? From your point of view they don’t have a brain but the are carrying out actions and making decisions. Where is that thinking taking place and how is it transmitted to them instantaneously? We of course know that it’s software and they are just a visual representation of code being executed somewhere else. We of course are a combination of hardware and software so the idea of someone being somewhere, but having all our thinking done somewhere else is a bit strange. This will change though as virtual reality make presence less of an issue. When a hologram you or virtual you can be at meetings this will become quite normal. And of course, perhaps our physical bodies may eventually be packed away for safe keeping or done away with altogether since it’s very susceptible to accidents and disease.
Here’s another interesting thought: You are walking along in the virtual woods with your virtual friends. Yes, let’s say the other characters are actually being controlled by your friends. Now, imagine an AI character in that game starts asking questions about the nature of reality. How did we get here? Who created us? But their reality is quite a bit different then yours. You tell them you aren’t “real”, but are actually controlled by a being outside of your Universe and with the flip of a switch they could end your Universe. You’ll live on, but they will not.. well.. not until your homework is done.. then their Universe will spring back to existence without them ever realizing anything was a miss.
One last thought: Let’s say one day you wake up and someone told you that you are “dead”. You died, but before you died your entire being was encoded and uploaded. You are officially software living in a “virtual” world with other physically deceased people. Your “living” relatives come and join you “virtually” in essentially the same way we play video games.. by created a digitized version of our self and putting it in the virtual world. I would imagine a broad range of emotions would roll through the complex functions that make up your software. (I wonder if they would slow the software down to make you more realistic?)
I don’t even need to think up crazy stuff like this myself: Huawei Prepares for Robot Overlords and Communication with the Dead
“He described a future where children could use apps like WeChat to interact with dead grandparents, thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers. All of these technologies would require huge amounts of data storage, which in turn could generate business for Huawei, he added.”
Categories
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/
“You must unlearn what you have learned.” – Yoda
It’s relatively easy for people to believe in God. The Bible says that even the demons believe in God (and shudder). But.. Yeshua/Jesus.. well, that’s different. Very few disagree that he existed, what they disagree on is who EXACTLY he was. Some even disagree about what he claimed about himself.
Here’s a thought: Since the idea behind this blog is understanding faith through the lens of technology… put yourself in God’s shoes for minute. Here is the scenario: Let’s say that you’ve created your own virtual Universe (No Man’s Sky). You’ve set up all the rules and the Universe pretty much runs itself and develops creatures that you can interact with. So much so that you begin to love them and they love you back. The question is.. do they love you because you made them and they have no choice? Suppose one of your other created beings is jealous of them and asks if they love you just because they have to. So, they are given a test. Will they obey? But alas, they don’t. They’ve decided to go their own way and that does NOT go well for them. What do you do? Wipe them out? Maybe, maybe this has happened before.. maybe a million times. Is there another way to convince them you love them and yet still retain your character. You can’t very well just leave them to their own devices.. that doesn’t go well. You need to be one of them, to show them the way.. even if it means they turn against you. It’s a delicate operation. How do you prove you are there to help without completely crushing their ability to choose to believe and follow you? Sure, you could show up as a giant flaming being with a voice like thunder… but that doesn’t seem to go well either. Their small simian brains tend to pop under that level of awesomeness.
This of course barely scratches the surface of where we are at with things… but again this is just a blog 🙂 It’s a strange idea of trying to be empathetic with God, but we have put on our humility hat and remember that if we created an all powerful AI it would very quickly being to think and operate in a way that was so far beyond us that it’s actions would seem completely incomprehensible to us mortals. I for one can easily imagine that.
Categories
Spiritual technology
I’m not a huge fan of our words for many things. What exactly do we mean my spiritual or supernatural? Einstein once described what we now call “entanglement” as “spooky action at a distance”. One particle interacting with another particle instantaneously across any distance was too “spooky” for Einstein. All these labels we put on things are an attempt to make sense of our complicated world. They are needed, but they can easily get in the way of truly understanding things.. or keep us from exploring new ideas.
One of my favorite lines in the movie Nacho Libre is “I don’t believe in God, I believe in Science.”. It’s hard to tell what exactly the writer was thinking when they put that line in there. It’s only really funny because of the characters and the situation but that’s how a lot of people think. For most people science means: Things I can touch, test, and stuff really smart people tell me is true. God and religion is the realm of fairy dust and hypocrites.
Back to the whole “entanglement” thing. I think this is where things get a little gray. It’s now a proven scientific “fact”.. but it sounds much too much like fairy dust. When you believe “Science” you don’t really get to pick and choose. To believe in science means to believe that there was nothing and then one day “nothing” exploded and the Universe popped out. Not only that, but of the near infinite ways it could have come about it just so happened to work out in our favor.
I’ve always believed that if there is a “spiritual” it’s mostly likely a “physical” that is just we don’t understand or aren’t capable of accessing. At some point the spiritual realm would need to interact with the physical realm anyway (what would be the point otherwise?). Entanglement is an easy one here. Teleportation and prayer (instant distant communication) suddenly seem much less fairy dust-like. But what about other things that still belong to the fairy dust realm?
God. The idea of an all knowing, all powerful being still lives in the fairy dust realm. But what about AI? It’s not that hard to build a case that at SOME point in our future an AI could be capable of becoming an all knowing, all powerful being. Especially if it mastered the use of entanglement to communicate with itself (and others?) throughout the Universe. This is not a new idea.. it’s at least as old as Issac Asimov. But with recent at advances it’s looking more and more inevitable.
Heaven. We are busy building virtual worlds and ways to interact with these virtual worlds. Why not make them “perfect”? No death, only fun. Sure, you’ll die in the real world.. but then why not work on uploading our brains to this virtual world.. aren’t we just essentially software running on bad hardware anyway? Why couldn’t there be backup copies of us already? If entanglement worked a bit like the Internet’s “cloud” it would be easy. Delete the copy of me here.. don’t worry there is a copy on another server somewhere that is updated in realtime. W00t.
Angels & Demons. This is easy. If we lowly humans are capable (or will be in a 100 years or so) of creating super power AI beings/robots/cyborgs whatever that are capable of operating at a higher level of physics.. whose to say in the few billion years that the Universe has been around someone else hasn’t been us to it? What’s the first thing we humans do when we create virtual worlds? We create “virtual” characters to inhabit them for us to befriend or fight or whatever. They don’t even need to obey the same laws of physics (physics is just “code” anyway).
Dragons & Magic (why not?). Easy too. Genes are becoming as easy write as software. Why not design and “print” a dinosaur? It’s coming. Because we can. Magic? I can ask a black box on my phone to call someone on the other side of the planet.
We are in our infancy when it comes to this new science and technology. Our words don’t begin address what many of these things really mean. If I woke up in a “virtual” world one day. How many days would I need to spend in there before that became my world? And don’t picture simple silly pixelated graphics. I mean a virtual world where I can breathe, touch, and taste. At what point does “virtual” vanish and become “real”. If I’ve spent YEARS in this world getting to know “characters” that are as smarter (or smarter) then real people. Would I be sad if one died? Would I be sad if I died? It would become really hard to convince me otherwise if I had “lived” there long enough. Some physicists are now trying to conduct tests to make sure that we aren’t already living in a “virtual” world. Would it matter? What would it change anything? And.. what would be the purpose of this “Earth” simulation? (Perhaps to learn to love an all powerful being in spite of everything else?)>
As a Christian.. aren’t we kind of in a virtual world already? There is a creator on the outside (and inside) looking in and controlling aspects. He has the power to flip a switch and shut the whole “program” down at any moment.. when it’s powered down we are told there is a “back up” copy of each and everyone of us.. destined to go on either to a Hell simulation or Heaven simulation (simulation probably isn’t the best world to use here). Those are big topics to flippantly blow past.. but this is a blog post.
A humorous (swearing) look at AI:
Categories
Parallel Universes
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160318-why-there-might-be-many-more-universes-besides-our-own
“The fundamental constants of the laws of physics seem bizarrely fine-tuned to the values needed for life to exist.”
“If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse”
“So far, there is no evidence that this is the case”
“Who are we to judge what is weird and what is not?”
“Ultimately, the scary thing about the rise of intelligent machines is not that they could someday have a mind of their own, but they could someday have a mind that we humans – with all our flaws and complexity – design and build for them.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/artificial-universe-no-mans-sky/463308/
“One might be the idea of an afterlife,” he said. “From a naturalistic understanding, when we die we basically rot. But if we are in a simulation, if you stop the program, you can restart it again. You can take data created by one program and enter it into another without violating any laws of nature.”
“If this world is a simulation,” I asked, “What does that say about our creators?”